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“Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Friday signed a bill that strips Walt Disney Co (DIS.N) of self-governing authority at its Orlando-area parks in retaliation for its opposition to a new law that limits the teaching of LGBTQ issues in schools.” Reuters
Here’s our recent coverage of Florida and Disney and the Florida education bill. The Flip Side
The right generally supports the bill and calls on corporations to avoid taking sides in the culture wars.
“The bill had nothing to do with Disney whatsoever — nothing to do with its product, its business model or its employees. The company got pushed into its stance based on pressure from a woke segment of its employees and from progressives on the outside…
“Like so many companies before, Disney calculated the risk/reward of gratuitously taking up a left-wing political and cultural fight and considered it all reward, no risk. The Florida legislature decided to convince it that it was wrong… Republicans don’t want corporations to become tools in advancing their agenda; they just want them to exit the culture wars and focus, once again, on their business, an outcome that would lower the temperature in the country’s cultural fights at least a little.”
Rich Lowry, New York Post
“Is that some betrayal of conservative principles? Hardly. What we’re talking about in the Disney case is taking away a corporate-welfare, crony carveout for The Mouse. It’s not like we’re drafting Goofy into the military or raising the capital-gains tax on Disney stock…
“And if this bloody nose is a lesson to boardrooms across America? America will be all the better for it. We need to take political maximalism out of every aspect of our lives. We shouldn’t have to swear an oath to wokeness to watch Snow White or drink a soda. As Michael Jordan famously said, ‘Republicans buy sneakers, too.’”
Ryan Ellis, National Review
“The broader lesson here for corporate America: Stay out of culture wars. Hundreds of major American companies have taken a stand on public policy issues in recent years. For instance, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Starbucks, Netflix, and General Motors, have opposed state laws over the past year to enhance ballot integrity…
“These positions threaten to alienate customers and harm shareholder value. Companies can't just dip their toe into these issues. Once they've waded in, activists will expect them to take a stance on every forthcoming topic. The only solution is to stay out altogether unless the policy proposal directly affects their bottom lines…
“Nobel-prize-winning economist Milton Friedman argued, ‘The social responsibility of business is to increase its profit.’ Shareholders can then use these profits to pursue the social goals they choose. Yet when companies or investment funds put their woke agenda ahead of profits, they rob shareholders of this opportunity. Corporations have no right to make these decisions for them.”
Ed Rensi, Fox Business
Some argue, “Using the state as a vehicle to reward friends and punish enemies is something that conservatives once excoriated, for good reason, as Gangster Government. Government policy toward individuals and businesses should be neutral to whether or not those in government agree or disagree with a given person or entity. Conservatives cheering on the idea of the government splitting the populace into friends and enemies should also recognize that there are times when they will end up as enemies of the state.”
Philip Klein, National Review
The left opposes the bill and argues that corporations should not be punished for their political speech.
The left opposes the bill and argues that corporations should not be punished for their political speech.
“Over the last century, the Supreme Court has extended civil rights to corporations, insulating them from government reprisal for exercising those rights. It wasn’t long ago that Republicans were cheering this trend. ‘Corporations are people,’ Mitt Romney famously said as a presidential candidate in 2012. The party also helped usher in the era of massive corporate political giving with the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which secured corporations’ rights as political donors under the First Amendment, and backed the Hobby Lobby decision, which recognized some corporations’ religious beliefs. These rulings had significant downsides for American democracy…
“‘There is the irony that conservatives for the last 20 years have been emphasizing that corporations have rights too and should be able to spend money to influence electoral politics,’ notes [law professor Adam Winkler]. ‘And yet, now they’re trying to punish a company for trying to influence politics.’”
Pema Levy, Mother Jones
“This isn’t about whether Disney’s state-created privileges are good or bad policy. There are reasonable arguments for reforming some of those privileges, such as its copyright protections. Rather, what’s at issue is the use of such a policy as retaliation against Disney for taking a stand on DeSantis’s law… You don’t have to back Disney’s stance to agree that the company should not be punished with a change in government policy for expressing its opinion of the law…
“On multiple fronts, the Republican Party is growing much more inclined to use state power to fight the culture wars… [J.D.] Vance, who’s running for Senate in Ohio in the New Right nationalist vein, said that if Donald Trump is reelected president, he should ‘fire every single midlevel bureaucrat’ and ‘every civil servant in the administrative state,’ and ‘replace them with our people.’…
“What might it look like if a President DeSantis took this view of the administrative state and decided to wield his power this way?… A lot is at stake in how DeSantis’s war with Disney turns out.”
Greg Sargent, Washington Post
“Is the [Florida] governor, who harbors well-known national ambitions, really sticking it to one of the most powerful corporations in the state? Or is he creating the talking point that he’s the governor who stuck it to one of the most powerful corporations in his state?… Were this dissolution to go into effect, it would be a total pain for everyone involved. Reedy Creek’s debts and obligations, previously paid almost entirely by Disney, would be transferred mostly to Orange County…
“[County tax collector Scott] Randolph said nobody knows exactly how much debt Reedy Creek has, though he’s heard figures like $1 billion and $2 billion tossed around. He knows Reedy Creek’s annual debt payments, though, are $58 million a year. ‘That all gets turned over to Orange County, right?’… ‘I don’t know how they absorb that without raising taxes,’ he said… [Several people I spoke with] suspect Disney and the government will reach some sort of face-saving settlement before the dissolution would go into effect.”
Jim Newell, Slate
A libertarian's take
“What makes this case unusual is that this is an extraordinary status that Disney got because it was Disney, and withdrawing that status would simply put Disney in the same position as other companies in that geographical area, and the bulk of other companies in Florida…
“To give an analogy, various state laws give special treatment to the NRA… Some of these laws were passed when the NRA was less politically active than it has been recently. Others might have been passed when the party in control of the legislature liked NRA's politics. Say that the state legislature decides that it doesn't like the NRA any more, because of the NRA's position on gun control laws, and decides to just eliminate this special treatment. I'm inclined to say that the legislature could do so.”
Eugene Volokh, Volokh Conspiracy
